Clean Fuel Breakthrough Turns Water Into Hydrogen at Room Temperature

[Finishline42]

With no energy input...

Hydrogen fuel promises to be a clean and abundant source of energy in the future – as long as scientists can figure out ways to produce it practically and cheaply, and without fossil fuels.

Scientists have described a relatively simple method involving aluminum nanoparticles that are able to strip the oxygen from water molecules and leave hydrogen gas.

The process yields large amounts of hydrogen, and it all works at room temperature.

That removes one of the big barriers to hydrogen fuel production: the large amounts of power required to produce it using existing methods.

This technique works with any kind of water, too, including wastewater and ocean water.

"We don't need any energy input, and it bubbles hydrogen like crazy," says materials scientist Scott Oliver from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

"I've never seen anything like it."

snip

Aluminum is a lot more abundant and easier to get hold of than gallium as it can be sourced from recycled materials. But in this process, gallium it can be recovered and reused many times over without losing its effectiveness. That's yet another factor in favor of the new technique.

There is still work to do, not least in making sure this can be scaled up from a lab set-up to something that can be used on an industrial scale. However, the early signs are that this is another method that has a lot of potential for hydrogen fuel production.

"Overall, the Ga-rich Ga−Al [gallium-rich gallium-aluminum] mixture produces substantial amounts of hydrogen at room temperature with no energy input, material manipulation, or pH modification," the researchers conclude in their published paper.

https://www.sciencealert.com/clean-fuel-breakthrough-turns-water-into-hydrogen-at-room-temperature?fbclid=IwAR2q0jKU657-318L14CXto_cSoLyfCBsXxNpaGwHT3GIlv3wPw9HM3Qu46Y

[quaint]

1. WOW!

This is exciting.

[lapfog_1]

2. so that explains the following scene

aluminum can and beer (water)... and some nano particle gallium.

Back to the Future indeed.

[Native]

3. I love reading news like this! Thank you!!!

[localroger]

4. This is BS. The energy is spent refining the aluminum.

You cannot "strip the oxygen" from a water molecule without using energy. You have to put in the same amount of energy that you will get when you burn the hydrogen to make water again. But aluminum is highly reactive, and it takes a massive energy input to separate the pure metal from aluminum ore. This is nothing new. Hobbyists have been using aluminum to generate hydrogen for decades. (Instead of nanoparticles they use a base like caustic or baking soda to catalyze the reaction.) It's great when you have a seemingly infinite supply of used aluminum cans, but it's not practical as a wide scale replacement for energy generation.

[Finishline42]

5. Which is why

You will find alum smelters around hydro plants. Quebec basically gives away the electricity in exchange for jobs.

Don't know if it's BS, the proof will be what the article says - if companies can make money by taking what they discovered in the lab and scaling up for commercial production.

[NNadir]

8. Of course, they would not do well around a few thousand square miles of wind facilities.

Producing metals using electricity requires the electricity to be reliable. This morning, all the wind turbines in the entire State of California were producing less than even one of the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors.

The heat for the electrolytic Hall Heroult process is maintained by electrical resistance, and were we to shut smelters down because the wind isn't blowing we'd waste enormous amounts of energy, not that anti-nukes give a shit about meaningful waste. On the contrary, they revel in waste and promote it, just so long as the waste doesn't excite their rather silly paranoia connected with radioactive decay.

One would need to be totally oblivious to think this nonsense paper is ever going to have commercial viability. It's absurd by inspection.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. This is 100% known chemistry, with a bullshit headline claiming "breakthrough".

The use of gallium-aluminum alloys to produce H2 (with the energy coming from the smelting of Al) was described YEARS ago.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Where's the Unrec button when you need it ?

Links to review articles on this topic, which has been studied for years:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gallium+aluminum+alloy+generating+hydrogen&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart

I find it ridiculous that an actual scientist would say "I've never seen anything like it". He'd have to be most under-informed scientist in his field for this to be surprising.